They were playing catch under the stars. Uther spent thirty seconds concentrating on Satya's glove before he threw the baseball, but it went wild. "Catch it!" he shrieked, and Satya, not stupid enough to jump, clomped down the metallic slope, flailing wildly for the ball. The effort was wasted: Satya's outstretched hand missed the ball by more than a meter.

They watched, stricken, as the ball crashed through Mrs. Galfrey's window. A bloom of freezing air flowered from the hole, and small, loose items began to fly out. One of these was Mrs. Galfrey's cat.

Then they ran like hell to the airlock, their magnetic boots clanging thunderously against the hull of the starship and incensing the neighbors below their feet.

Luc Reid (www.lucreid.com) lives and writes in Burlington, Vermont. He's a 2002 finalist and 2003 winner of the Writers of the Future contest whose first published story appeared in the May/June 2003 issue of Abyss & Apex. He has recently finished a novel about three dead people and an army of demons, and is at work on two other books.